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Yesterday Ira Glass sent an email revealing that This American Life’s report on Apple’s manufacturing supplier in China “contained significant fabrications.” Mike Daisey’s story and TAL’s decisions to go to air and later retract the show have sparked a lot of discussion in journalism and public radio circles.

There’s a lot of praising, challenging, and questioning going on. Frankly, much of it feels like punditry and harmless posturing. But, this Saturday afternoon a stream of tweets by Marketplace’s John Moe put a human face on this story and some of the underlying ethical issues at stake.

(I’ve kept the format in order to preserve, hopefully, the rhythm of Moe’s thoughts.)

Reflections

I appreciate John Moe's honesty about his envy of Mike Daisey's success. I'll bet he's no longer quite as envious now that Daisey's embellishment of the truth has been revealed. Mike Daisey's theatre piece about Foxconn was mesmerizing. So I was extremely disappointed to hear that he misled his audience. Now, he seems to be trying to rationalize it in much the same way that James Frey did about A Million Little Pieces. I heard Daisey interviewed on NPR a couple of weeks ago. He had a chance to mention his fabrications, but he didn't. There's nothing to envy there. I just hope that Daisey's distortions don't take the spotlight off the human rights abuses in China's factories that are real.

Professional jealousy is a green beast that confronts us all at one time or another. This is true even among people in supposedly more spiritual vocations like ministry, or poetry, teaching. I applaud Moe's honesty in naming it. It complicates all our most honest attempts to do our work with integrity and excellence.